You've been editing the same six images your whole life.

I mean that almost literally. Sit down and try to remember your childhood and see how many actual pictures you get. Not stories, not facts about the era, not "we lived on Ninth Street and there was a dog." Pictures. Scenes with light in them. I get about six. A yellow kitchen. A specific afternoon on a specific carpet with a specific toy. The back seat of a car, at night, streetlights sliding across the ceiling. The rest is captions.

And the six are suspicious. The yellow kitchen is lit like a photograph, because there's a photograph, and I've looked at it more than I ever looked at the kitchen. The carpet afternoon has a camera angle. I'm seeing it from slightly above and to the side, like a director. Nobody remembers from above and to the side. You remember from your eyes. If the memory has a camera in it, somebody put it there, and the somebody was me, later, doing repairs.

The repair shop

I think of it as a repair shop now. Every time you go back to a memory you take it off the shelf, and it's a little more worn than you remember, and you touch it up before you put it back. You fix the color. You move a person closer to the center. You give them a line that makes the scene make sense. You don't know you are doing it. You're just remembering, which is the same thing.

Then the next time you take it down, the touched-up version is what's there. The original is gone. It was gone the first time.

This is why the stories you have told most often are the ones you should trust least. The good ones, the ones that get the laugh at dinner, have been through the shop a hundred times. Every telling shaved off a detail that did not serve the story and added one that did. By now it's a good story. It's also a painting of a photograph of a thing that happened, and the painting is signed by you.

My father tells a story about the day I was born that has, over thirty years, acquired a snowstorm. There was no snowstorm. I have checked. He isn't lying. He has just been to the shop.

Forgery is a kind of love

I want to be careful here because I don't think this is a tragedy, or even a problem, most of the time. A forgery isn't random. When you forge a memory you forge it toward something. You put the person you love closer to the center because they're the center. You give the afternoon better light because it was, in the way that mattered, a bright afternoon. You're not falsifying the past. You're annotating it with everything you learned about it since, and the annotations are true even when the details are not.

The kitchen wasn't that yellow. But it was that safe, and the yellow is how I keep the safe.

Borges wrote a story about a man, Funes, who after a fall from a horse could forget nothing. Every leaf on every tree, every cloud shape, every moment in full. He couldn't think, because thinking means letting go of the particulars to hold the general. He had to lie in a dark room. Perfect recall was a kind of paralysis. Forgetting was the thing that made him a person, and he had lost it.

So I've stopped wanting the original. The original would be Funes. The forgery is the version with me in it.

The argument about the restaurant

Every couple has one. Ours is about a restaurant in a city we visited once, years ago, where something small and good happened, and the disagreement is about which restaurant. I have it on a corner with a green awning. She has it down a flight of stairs, no windows. We've had this argument five or six times and it never gets anywhere because we're both certain, in the way you can only be certain about a thing you can't check.

What I've slowly understood is that we're both right, and both wrong, and it doesn't matter. We each took the evening to the shop. I fixed it toward a corner because I like corners. She fixed it toward stairs because, I think, she remembers going down into something, being enclosed, and that's what the evening was for her. The details are forgeries. The thing they're forging, that the evening was good and that we were both in it, is the only part that was ever true, and we agree on that part completely.

We've stopped trying to settle it. Now when it comes up one of us says "the green awning" and the other says "the stairs" and that's the whole exchange, a little call and response, a memory of arguing about a memory, and it's become one of the six images. Which is a strange thing to happen to an argument, and I don't know what to do about it except enjoy it.

The ones you cannot forge

There's a catch, and it's the reason I'm writing this.

The shop only works on memories you visit. The ones you take down and handle and put back. The ones you never take down don't get worn, but they also don't get repaired, and after enough years the shelf is just gone. You cannot forge a thing you can't find.

I have a grandmother I remember in exactly one picture. A doorway, a light behind her, a shape. No face. I know what her face looked like from photographs, and I can put the photograph face on the shape, and I do, but I can feel that it's a transplant. The shape is the only thing I own outright. Everything else about her I've been told.

And there are people you know are in there somewhere, a teacher, a friend from a single summer, somebody's older brother, whom you've not visited in so long that the door doesn't open anymore. You know the room exists. You can see the door. That's all.

That's what actually scares me about memory. Not that I'll misremember. I will. I already have. I'm fine with it. What scares me is the things I won't remember at all, because I didn't go back often enough to keep the paint fresh, and one day I'll reach for them and there will be a door and nothing behind it.

So

Visit the ones you want to keep. Handle them. Get them wrong, a little, every time. That's the price of keeping them at all, and it's cheap.

And take photographs of the kitchen, because in thirty years the photograph will be the memory, and you won't be able to tell, and it won't matter.